I started playing Vintage Story about a month ago and I've really been enjoying it. I've been playing the standard game mode with default settings in single player, and I've just gotten up to iron tier and starting pursuing the story. I wanted to share my thoughts on what I'd like to see added or changed in the game based on my experiences so far.
1) Sleep vs standing still. At the start of the game, standing still seemed to conserve satiety better than going to sleep. This was meaningful at the start of the game since I didn't have a good farm yet and food scarcity in winter made me want to stretch food further. This encouraged me to spend time doing nothing, mostly when waiting for the night to pass, rather than engage with other game mechanics. If sleep had been equally efficient, I would have preferred to use it to skip time and spend more of my time in game actively. When food eventually ran out (after February when winter was "over", but berries did not return until June), it became easier to just repeatedly starve to death, and make sure to die in a place I could pick up my inventory. Once I was able to find medium fertility soil (difficult on the island I started on, requiring a raft and much searching, perilous dying far from spawn across an ocean), and begin my farming season immediately after the first winter ended, I had enough food to no longer care about whether sleep was more or less efficient.
2) Temperature's effect on hunger vs health. It was intuitive that I might freeze to death if I got too cold, so I needed warm clothes. After making fur and rawhide clothing, I was confused to see that I still suffered a hunger penalty indifferent to what I was wearing. Were my clothes doing nothing? It took some reading to learn how temperature really worked in game; warm clothes would change when I started losing body heat, but I'd still get more hungry regardless of what I was wearing if temperatures dropped below a threshold and I wasn't indoors. I would have liked my clothing to offset the hunger threshold too, and for info about the total temperature offset my clothes were granting to appear nearby my body temperature info. Again, once farming picked up, I had enough food to mostly not worry about the hunger penalty. But until that first harvest in the following year came, starvation was a constant threat.
3) Sailing! Getting a sailboat felt amazing, though farming enough flax took me several in game years. Year 0, without medium fertility soil, no starting seeds, a shorter growing window, was not very productive for flax. Year 1 harvest provided about half the flax I required. Year 2 harvest provided the remaining flax I needed. Having found medium fertility soil part way through Year 1, I could also enjoy 2 harvests in Year 2, though I had enough flax after the first harvest of that year. The one change I would like to see with the sailboat is the way the furl/unfurl controls work. Currently a right click cycles closed > half open > fully open > closed. I would like to be able to left click to cycle backwards, right click to cycle forwards. I rarely want to go from fully open to closed, but instead go from fully open to half open, then closed.
4) Alternatives to fat, for the players that enjoy doing runs where they don't hunt animals. I'm not the kind of player who falls into this camp; I typically play a game without adding extra challenges, and leather is a valuable resource in this game. But I can see that beeswax and resin can frequently stand in for fat in bow making and food preservation. And soybeans are a cool alternative protein source already in the game. My workshop required a lot of fat to create all the gears and axles though. With tools like the fruit press, I was thinking about the long history of oil pressing from seeds. If oil is historically made by roasting, grinding, then pressing seeds, perhaps oil could be added to the game to replace fat in many recipes. Oil also has a long history of being made through water extraction, for that first bit of fat you would need to replace in the fruit press recipe, before it could be more efficiently made. I also see olives are in the game, though I haven't found them yet.
5) Potash is a pain to make a lot of. I would like to see a cauldron, or some other update that allows me to cook more of it at once than the cooking pot does.
6) I would really appreciate a spyglass, to zoom in on animals I can see in the distance, to better ID them without getting too close. Is that a boar or a wolf? What kind of deer is that? These are the questions I frequently ask. With the introduction of grinding coming in v1.22, it would be wonderful to be able to grind a lens, and create a spyglass item. I know there are mods for spyglasses. I am currently playing without mods, and would love to see one in the core game.
I'm very excited for the fishing, in wall axle, big windmill, watermill and cabinets coming in v1.22, and the changes to cooking stacks of things without the temperature resetting. The direction the game is moving in seems great. And the way blueprints will allow me to bring my base to a new world, rather than start from scratch after an update that changes world gen is very exciting.
